How it Works

What Does Swirly Music Do, Exactly?

You want people to be able to find and buy your music easily. You don’t want to have to fuss with printing scores and parts and mailing them every time you get someone interested. Swirly Music handles that for you. Place your scores with us and you will never have to lift a finger to get your music to musicians who want it. You can focus on composing and promoting your work.

Professional Music Printing

We offer a user-friendly store, high-quality printing by music professionals and shipping directly to the buyer. Our printer is accustomed to standard music paper sizes like 9×12 for keyboard and solo voice, or choral octavo size. No need to settle for the paper size limitations of your home ink jet printer. Scores are professionally prepared with saddle-stitch (stapled) binding and a variety of color cover options.

Download Option

Upon request, particularly choral works can be made available for download as a convenience to your customers. Downloadable PDFs that are purchased are stamped on the fly with the buyer’s identity and the license information, so as to discourage unauthorized copying (theft) of your work.

What We Need from You

You provide us with your print-ready scores (PDF), and as much supporting information as you have, including descriptions, program notes, press quotes, performance audio excerpts and video. The information you provide is assembled into a score listing page (example), where the buyer can immediately order the item, professionally printed or in some cases for download, via the shopping cart.

What Happens Next

Whether customers are searching for your music in particular, or for repertoire in a particular instrumental category, your music is available in the store and easily added to the shopping cart. Tell your friends and colleagues where to find your music! Swirly Music takes care of printing and fulfilling the order, and tracks the sale so you receive your portion of the revenue.

Compensation for You

Swirly Music tracks orders for each composer’s work and pays each composer 50% of the net revenue * from their sales on a monthly basis by ACH transaction to your bank account. (Compare this to the 10%-12% you might get from a traditional publisher.) After deducting the cost of printing and fulfilling each order (the cost can vary) from Swirly Music’s share, the resulting revenue sharing ratio is a roughly 50/50 split.

* – For print orders, the real breakdown is 40/60 (composer/Swirly), as printing costs are covered by Swirly Music’s portion. For download orders the split is a straight 50/50.

What Does it Cost?

Adding titles to our system is a manual and somewhat time-consuming process, and so it is necessary to charge a nominal fee for adding additional titles. The larger the number of titles, the lower the per-title fee, along the lines of this table:

No. of Titles

Price

Per-Title Savings

1 title

$10.00

$10.00

5 titles

$40

$10.00 $8.00

10 titles

$60

$10.00 $6.00

15 titles

$75

$10.00 $5.00

> 15 titles

please inquire

It is best to plan ahead for roughly how many titles you would like to add in order to get the best price. For a larger volume than 15 titles, we will work with you to come up with a fair bulk fee.

Give it a Try!

Get started now by signing up here. Your scores will be available for purchase in no time!